


i would've followed all the way, no matter how far

by princessoftheworlds



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Inspired by Art, M/M, Original Character(s), Post-Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26262361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princessoftheworlds/pseuds/princessoftheworlds
Summary: A short interview with a witness who knows just a bit too much.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Comments: 16
Kudos: 49
Collections: Torchwood Fan Fests: Bingo Fest 2020





	i would've followed all the way, no matter how far

**Author's Note:**

> Based off [this lovely comic](https://chekov-and-hobbes.tumblr.com/post/628163776146980864/a-short-interview-with-a-witness-who-knows-just-a) by chekov-and-hobbies on tumblr that you just need to see! (No, really. It's incredible. I couldn't stop thinking about it.) Also, thank you to Louise for giving this a quick readover. Dedicated to Jacklynn who introduced me to the comic and is very obsessed with it, and of course, dedicated to the lovely artist!
> 
> This covers the "psychic powers/telepathy," "benign alien visitor," and "canon-compliant" squares for my Torchwood Fan Fest Bingo Fest card. The psychic powers and benign alien visitor is covered by the elderly woman, and it's canon-compliant because it fits between S2 and COE. I do acknowledge that the woman isn't necessarily benign, but she isn't entirely malicious either ahahah.

A ghostly figure appears in the middle of a Cardiff street and causes a devastating car crash one chilly afternoon, and Jack and Ianto rush to the scene, Gwen sick as a dog at home. For once, Jack eschews his duties of flirting with the witnesses - a young teenage couple on their way home and an eldery woman - to assess the wreckage and the one dead body.

As Ianto finishes up with the elderly woman, he turns to eye the grey wool of Jack’s trousers stretched over his shapely arse as Jack bends forward to shift through the mangled fragments of metal and glass. Sensing Ianto’s eyes on him, Jack glances towards him and smiles warmly, and despite their surroundings, Ianto can’t help but smile back.

When Ianto faces the elderly woman again, her plum-colored lips are curled in a knowing expression. She says cryptically, “She forgives you.”

“Pardon me?” responds Ianto, brow furrowing. 

“Lisa,” the woman states. “She forgives you. She doesn’t blame you for loving him.”

Ianto swallows that sudden lump in his throat, shoves away the creeping sense of dread. “If you’ll excuse me for a moment,” he tells the woman, and she nods. He walks towards Jack with stiff legs.

“Hey!” Jack greets him with the same sunny smile. Ianto’s fingers itch to reach out and grab Jack, to bury themselves in the warmth of Jack’s greatcoat. “What’s up? Get anything off the witnesses?”

“That woman over there knows too much.”

Jack follows Ianto’s point to the elderly woman; she appears nonthreatening - petite with grey hair bundled up in a bun and a fringe over her brow, plum coat wrapped over a blue dress and tan knit sweater, thin legs covered in stockings tucked into brown boots - but has Ianto shaken. And Jack always trusts Ianto’s instincts.

Still, cautiously, Jack says, “She’s a witness; she’s supposed to know too much.”

“She told me that Lisa forgives me,” Ianto replies, sounding borderline hysterical, and Jack peers at him with concern in his beautiful sky blue eyes. 

He reaches forward and laces their fingers together, gently rubbing his thumb against Ianto’s palm. “We need to talk to her.”

Brief introductions are exchanged. Then Jack leads the woman to a small area of benches pushed against planters across the street, just outside an office complex. Jack and Ianto sit side-by-side on one, opposite the woman on her own bench.

As Jack leans forward, hands clutched loosely in his lap, the woman tells him, “You are going to outlive this world.” 

Jack inhales sharply and doesn’t reply for a brief moment. “That’s a very odd way of telling me I’m very healthy and am going to live a long life,” he jokes finally.

The woman barks a laugh. It is not a kind sound. “That’s not what I meant, and I know it.”

“What I do know,” begins Jack slowly, “is that you are one of three witnesses to a devastating car crash. We would like to know what you saw.”

“I already told your partner over there.” And her utterance of  _ partner _ sounds like she means it in every instance of the word, just as John Hart had. Her well-manicured fingers twitch compulsively. 

Ianto, hunched over, elbows braced on his knees, brow heavy, doesn’t return Jack’s gaze or respond to the woman.

“Yes,” Jack says, “but you also told him something else.” He grins charmingly. “What I want to know is how you knew what you told him?”

Her clever, dark eyes make direct contact with Jack’s. “You have a thief’s smile.”

Jack’s grin dims. His hands slip to grip at his knee. “What does that mean?”

She shrugs. For just a moment, she could be anyone’s grandmother. Then those twitching fingers are slipping into her coat’s pocket, and she pulls out a tan packet from which she slides a lone cigarette. She tucks it between her full lips and lights the tip with a lighter from the same pocket; she pulls the cigarette away and blows a puff of smoke all while Jack and Ianto watch her critically.

“Look,” she begins, the hazy smoke still lingering before her, “you know as well as I do how out of place you two are around here.”

“Interesting…” Jack’s head dips. His smile returns and slips away, quick like a memory, quick like a fish in water. He meets the woman’s gaze again. “Where would you estimate we belong?”

“You?” The woman raises a sharp eyebrow, takes another long drag of her cigarette. “You belong in another place. I don’t know where or how…”

(He’s ten years old and standing on a sandy beach. There are knobbly trees with roots that snake deep into the sand on either side of him and scraggy dry bushes that crunch beneath his boots. The sun is blistering on his back, but the tan layers of his clothing protect his skin from burning despite the heat. The withered wind knocks his hair askew.

He’s ten years old and playing cricket on the beach with his dad and his brother. His dad bowls that leather ball to him, and he whacks it forward with the bat they’ve fashioned from a long piece of driftwood. Gray goes dashing for it, tripping over the sand. Javic laughs. Last week, he caught his father gazing longingly at the brand-new cricket kit in the market, but Javic loves the one they’ve crafted. Gray finds the ball, but then their mother is calling them to dinner where she serves them steaming plates of the fish Franklin caught earlier in the day.

He’s six, sitting on the beach, and Gray is small, perched carefully in their mother’s lap and babbling as he reaches for clumps of her golden hair. She gently pushes his hand aside and tries to feed him soft nuts from their picnic basket. His father works on carving something from driftwood. It’ll be a lovely statuette for their mother.

He’s young, too young to even know his age, and his parents are gently splashing him in the waves. Javic’s giggling, and Gray won’t be born for another two years, but he’s happy. Later, his mother dries him off, and he’s set between his parents as his mother points out the constellations and their stars out to him. They’ll do this often in the summer almost every year.

He’s ten again, and he’s standing on the beach. Only moments ago, he’d been running on the beach, his lungs burning, Gray’s hand clutched tightly in his. Then Gray had slipped away, and by the time Javic had glanced back, it’d been too late. So now he stands, gazing forward. Gray stands before him, hidden by a haze of white smoke, and he’s yelling and waving. Javic can’t see him. Jack can’t see him. Not until it’s too late.)

“...but I’ll figure out,” she finishes when Jack is knocked back to reality. 

Boeshane is not here in Cardiff; it has never been. Jack has never been so aware of that.

“And you,” the woman says, turning to Ianto, cigarette held between slim fingers. Ianto gazes back unflinchingly. “At his side.” Neither turn to gaze at Jack, which speaks more than if they had. “Like you’ve always been there…”

(Bute Park is dark but not quiet. The grunts and snarls of a man and Weevil struggling fill the air. He steps out from the trees, the piece of wood heavy in his hand when he thrashes the Weevil into submission. He flirts with the blue-eyed man he helps to his feet, eyes the handsome coat on the handsome man. Takes in whiffs of those heady pheromones. The man’s beautiful eyes narrow in suspicion as he mentions the Weevil. Ianto stuffs his hands in his pocket as he watches Captain Jack Harkness carry the Weevil away. 

They sit together in the SUV. Ianto just saved this man’s life; Ianto just endangered this man’s life. Every part of him is  _ hurting,  _ is  _ broken,  _ but Jack’s lips on his dulls the pain, briefly makes everything feel alright. They fumble with each other’s clothes. Ianto invites him upstairs to his flat. They don’t make it to the bed the first time. In the morning, neither of them mention it never happening again, so it happens again. And again. And again until it turns into a three month absence and then dinner and a movie.

He hammers on the glass of the cell, watching that irritating bastard smirk and swan around in that gaudish coat. Ianto’s heart remains lodged in his throat; he’s only felt this desperation once before, when he was pulling Lisa from the burning, bloody wreckage of Canary Wharf. He threatens Hart, unaware of what he’s saying. His need to find Jack battles with his concern for Tosh and Owen. At least Gwen is besides him. Ianto feels helpless, but he doesn’t know that he’ll feel even more helpless in the coming hours. He just  _ needs  _ to be by Jack’s side.

He’s lying on the floor of Thames House, body weak. Jack cradles him, weeping and begging for him not to go.  _ It’s not as if I want to go,  _ he wants to scream to Jack, but the air in his lungs is slowly stilling. Ianto gazes up, willing his mind to memorize the grief-stricken features of Jack’s beautiful face while he can, but there’s not enough time. He’s being dragged away into the darkness of death. He dies by Jack’s side.)

“...and you always will be.” The woman is no longer even acknowledging them with their gaze; her eyes are fixed on the sky.

At some point during those brief flashes, Ianto’s hand had curled into a loose fist on his knee. Now, Jack slowly reaches for it, but Ianto pulls it away as he rises to his feet. He ignores Jack’s expression of concern. “I’m going to go interview the other witnesses,” he says resignedly. 

“Sir,” adds the woman, cigarette poised before her plum lips. When Jack and Ianto gaze questioningly at her, Jack’s hand warm at Jack’s back, Ianto frozen in adjusting his scarf, she leans back against the planter. She smirks, dragging on the cigarette and exhaling its smoke. “Even when he doesn’t say it, he does.” 

Ianto stalks off. Jack narrows his eyes at the woman. “What are you?” The words are a near snarl.

“You’ve met one like me before, Captain,” the woman says. “A little girl.”

“Faith?” Jack surmises. He drums his fingers against his knee, kicks his boot slightly against the pavement. 

The woman nods. “You won’t find the answers that you’re looking for this time around, but I will.”

Before Jack can reply, a clatter from across the street snatches his attention away, but it’s just one of the teenagers Ianto is questioning. She accidentally tripped over a piece from the car crash. Jack faces the woman again, but she’s gone. Not disappeared into thin air but rather as if she’d never actually been there to begin with.

“One day, I will find all the answers I need,” Jack vows and gets up to return to Ianto’s side.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr [here](http://princess-of-the-worlds.tumblr.com/) or on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/rajkumarinik). I tweet and reblog mostly Torchwood with occasionally amusing commentary on nonsense. Please come talk to me and tell me if/how much you like my fic or like ask me about it on tumblr; all my schoolwork has become remote now, and I have limited social interaction.


End file.
